Many users are continuing to use Windows XP instead of upgrading to Windows 7 mainly because they don't believe the upgrade is necessary. Depending on what you use your PC for that may be the case, but as technology moves forward XP begins to come up short in some areas.

One such area is that of storage space on hard drives. Windows XP can only recognize hard drives up to 2.2TB in size. 3TB drives are now becoming commonplace, and eventually they will become the most cost effective and easiest to source drives.

So where does this leave XP users? 3TB+ drives can be used with an XP system, but only 2.2TB of space will be usable meaning you are paying for storage you'll never be able to use. However, Paragon Software claims to have a solution in the form of the Paragon GPT Loader.

GPTL consists of a special driver that adds support for GUID Partition Tables under Windows XP. That means a 3TB+ drive can be installed with all of its storage space usable. There are a few caveats, though. GPTL will only work on drives that do not contain the Windows operating system for your machine, so any 3TB drive would have to form a secondary storage drive. There is also no provision for using RAID or having the drive as external to your machine.

Even with those limitations this may be the simplest way to increase storage with the latest hard drives under Windows XP. The good news is it's currently free to download and use GPTL through Paragon's Early Adopter Program.

Rudy. Did you miss the list of caveats? The only way to overcome these is by upgrading to Windows 7. Duh!

There are a few caveats, though. GPTL will only work on drives that do not contain the Windows operating system for your machine, so any 3TB drive would have to form a secondary storage drive. There is also no provision for using RAID or having the drive as external to your machine.

Did you miss the list of caveats? The only way to overcome these is by upgrading to Windows 7. Duh!

There are no caveats for data partitions. If you want to boot from a GPT drive only on an EFI system (which are hardly mainstream), you would need 64-bit Vista or Windows 7 (even 32-bit Windows 7 doesn't support that) but that limitation might also be addressed sooner or later by Paragon for all 32-bit OSes. This essentially brings 32-bit XP up to the same level of GPT support as XP x64 or Server 2003 x64.

And even if they change the sector size, manufacturers like Seagate emulate 512 k sectors and are incorporating logic in the circuit board for oldes OSes to work around in their logic board or they would see drop in their own product's sales.

Point is, industry always works around limitations if the OS is in use by the mass market. I personally would use such large drives only for storing data and use an SSD for the OS.

And even if they change the sector size, manufacturers like Seagate emulate 512 k sectors and are incorporating logic in the circuit board for oldes OSes to work around in their logic board or they would see drop in their own product's sales.

how so?

most pc now a day are sold with Win7

and most sales goes with OEMs

so.....

i don't see the point of putting huge harddrive in obsolate pc platform (e.g. P4s )

Rudy, can you explain or show what components of Windows 7 exactly make use of multiple cores or what APIs, interfaces or frameworks does it offer to app developers to write more efficient multi core apps? You can get quad cores or octo cores and happily compute on XP. W7 does nothing multiCORE specific to accelerate any component. Do you not know you have to write code specifically to get advantage of multi-cores? Almost everyone seems to have this false impression that W7 and Vista have some magical wonderful "multiprocessor support". Now what that better multiprocessor support is, I don't see anywhere documented on MSDN. There's Parallel Patterns Library for native code and ParallelFX for .NET which is Visual Studio features available on all OSes for which you can compile. No OS play is involved. IE9 is the only app that I know whose Chakra engine takes advantage of multiple cores.

Rudy, can you explain or show what components of Windows 7 exactly make use of multiple cores or what APIs, interfaces or frameworks does it offer to app developers to write more efficient multi core apps? You can get quad cores or octo cores and happily compute on XP. W7 does nothing multiCORE specific to accelerate any component. Do you not know you have to write code specifically to get advantage of multi-cores? Almost everyone seems to have this false impression that W7 and Vista have some magical wonderful "multiprocessor support". Now what that better multiprocessor support is, I don't see anywhere documented on MSDN. There's Parallel Patterns Library for native code and ParallelFX for .NET which is Visual Studio features available on all OSes for which you can compile. No OS play is involved.

Uh? My point is that XP still has a place in today's computers, sure Win7 can do a lot of things but XP will satisfy most people's needs

Rudy, can you explain or show what components of Windows 7 exactly make use of multiple cores or what APIs, interfaces or frameworks does it offer to app developers to write more efficient multi core apps? You can get quad cores or octo cores and happily compute on XP. W7 does nothing multiCORE specific to accelerate any component. Do you not know you have to write code specifically to get advantage of multi-cores? Almost everyone seems to have this false impression that W7 and Vista have some magical wonderful "multiprocessor support". Now what that better multiprocessor support is, I don't see anywhere documented on MSDN. There's Parallel Patterns Library for native code and ParallelFX for .NET which is Visual Studio features available on all OSes for which you can compile. No OS play is involved. IE9 is the only app that I know whose Chakra engine takes advantage of multiple cores.